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  LONE STAR ZOMBIE CHAPTER ONE   Before. I stopped watching the news because I read somewhere that successful people focused on things they could control. It’s hard to control the news. It’s designed for shock value, and in a game of ratings, most news reporting started to rely on shock value. I feel I may have missed out on a lot. Sometimes, I’d watch gas prices shoot up and wonder what happened to affect the price. Then I’d click into a station and hear that the President was making remarks about the Middle East, which would make oil prices rise, and speculators would rush in to change the price of a barrel. Then gas stations which were owned by conglomerates working in the Middle East would raise the price of gas. It made a lot of investment guys rich and took money away from most of the working people I knew at the time. Twenty bucks a week more for gas didn’t hurt someone who made six figures a year, but a single mom would suffer from the loss. I thought about that as I stood guar

  We called them California cousins.   That’s who we were headed to see when I was four.   I feel like this is a memory, except I know I was too young to remember.   So it’s probably something I was told over and over again until it seems like something I remember.   An oral tradition in our little family when I was a kid.   Just a single hippie mom, and her two kids, fresh from a divorce and looking for a new life.   A new life out West.   We were going to see the California Cousins, and live with them.   I think that if we had made it, life might have turned out very different for me.   For us. But our car broke down near Pine Bluff AR where my grandparents lived and we stayed there.   I did end up making it to CA two decades later.   Loved it.   I loved the beach and mountains and deserts.  I loved the Hollywood Industry and star sightings and making movies.   I was married to a girl from AR who didn’t love it so much.   Hated it, in fact.   And by virtue of a convoluted decision ma

  HELL TO PAY     "A Trooper is virtuous. He never denies battle, even when he is outnumbered. A Trooper is poor, chaste, kind to women." The Trooper Creed       Paying Hell   Ralph stared across the hardpan surface of the alien planet. It was covered in dust and rock, a dry desolate plain spread out in front of them, bordered by a rock wall on one side and a sea of sand so fine, it was like sinking in water every time someone took a step on it. They had lost several transports that way, the first on accident, the next two a test of sorts, a test that failed, and cost the life of one Trooper. The others they had been able to rescue. "How goes it?" a voice interrupted his reverie. Ralph pointed to the instant structures at the far end of the plain. They were faded from sunlight and use, but still functional in the Martian atmosphere. "No one has been in or out in two hours." "You've stood watch that long?" Ral

  CHAPTER ONE       The neon lights fought a valiant battle against the sunlight, but failed. "When did you clean the windows?" Jake Burbank sat on his stool at the end of the well worn bar and nursed a half tumbler full of amber whiskey. This particular vintage was from Rock Town Distillery in Little Rock, up the road from where they were by forty five minutes or so, depending on the drive. "Yesterday," Amber said to him. She had introduced him to Rock Town, as she called it, as was her prerogative as owner of the bar and number one contact for any salesperson who stepped through the door, whether they represented liquor or credit card point of sales systems or the latest, a wave of knock off perfume salesmen staying at the Holiday Inn on the Interstate. "You can tell?" she asked. Amber was always busy doing something. She had to be. Working a bar was an exercise in manual labor and psychology. There were always glasses to be c